Uranium One Scandal Simmers on Back Burner

Thanks to the Alabama Senate race and all its “he said, she said” controversy, we haven’t heard much about Hillary Clinton lately. Surely she’s hoping all that hullabaloo will drag on through the holidays until some other scandal or big news story grabs the headlines.

But those pesky little dribs and drabs of news we’re getting about the Uranium One scandal are arousing plenty of interest and concern in uncomfortable places. Forget the rabble-rousers crying “treason” though. As Jonah Goldberg notes at National Review, that 20% share of American uranium Hillary sold off to the Russians is but 2/10 of 1% of the world’s global reserves — and Russia has nine times our share already. (Goldberg and fellow NR writer Andrew McCarthy have been a veritable tag team of information on the scandal.) No, the criminality is where we often find corruption: follow the money.

For example, what made Bill Clinton such an interesting speaker that a “Kremlin-tied” financial institution would pony up a cool $500,000 to hear him talk? And how about all those millions that found their way into the Clinton Foundation coffers right about then?

The part of the alleged criminality that ties more directly to Hillary Clinton is the disposal of thousands of emails accrued while she was Barack Obama’s secretary of state — emails that should have been kept as part of the public record but instead were stashed on an inaccessible (except, perhaps, to hackers) private server. Of course, Hillary was hiding something, and this little bit of smoke that Uranium One represents could be a significant brushfire when one considers all the unsavory characters who may have done business via the back channels of the Clinton Foundation to avoid the front door of public scrutiny with the Obama administration. It’s a heck of a mess that’s been left to Attorney General Jeff Sessions.

Sessions had been given a full plate already thanks to Democrats’ calls to investigate Russian ties to President Trump — an investigation in which Sessions has been unnecessarily hamstrung by his decision to recuse himself. But that hasn’t stopped the Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee, led by Chairman Bob Goodlatte of Virginia, from demanding Sessions select a second special counsel to match the Democrats’ choice of onetime FBI head Robert Mueller to investigate the Trump campaign. In a Sept. 26 letter to Sessions, Goodlatte and his committee urged the appointment of a special counsel as the case “only reinforces the sense that our nation’s top law enforcement officials conspired to sweep the Clinton ‘matter’ under the rug, and that there is, truly, one system for the powerful and politically well-connected, and another for everyone else.”

On the other hand, some contend a Clinton investigation can be handled within the Justice Department. Once again, Andrew McCarthy argues, “Republicans should stop grousing about a special counsel and hope Deputy Attorney General Rosenstein has the good sense to assign any Clinton investigation to a credible counsel. What is needed here is a scrupulous, experienced, skillful prosecutor — preferably, a district U.S. attorney with an excellent staff — who has not commented publicly on the matters under investigation and whose integrity is beyond question.”

Another person who’s objecting to the appointment of a special counsel is, of course, Hillary Clinton, who called the idea an “abuse of power.” (Something tells us she’s an expert in the field.) But even more ironic is her assertion later in the interview that appointing a special counsel “will also send a terrible signal to our country and the world that somehow we are giving up on the kind of values that we used to live by and we used to promote worldwide.” Madam Hillary, we believe that ship sailed while your husband was president.

Hillary and Bill can hope that some other sex scandal (oh, again the irony) can pop up and keep Uranium One off the front pages and the nightly news. But those who are now intent on following the money trail could make things very interesting over the next few weeks. There’s no doubt that sex sells, but so does unmasking those whose sold us out.

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